A retired principal, Pat Buoncristiani, writes to describe what she learned in many years of experience..
She writes:
When I was the principal of a struggling Title 1 school I grappled for the reasons behind my children’s difficulties. Others would make suggestions – it’s because their parents don’t care, it’s something about their race, it’s because they have bad role models and so on. It seemed apparent to me that the underlying cause of all this was simple and yet extraordinarily difficult to deal with. It was poverty. Until we deal with the rising tide of poverty in our society too many of our children will continue be swept by this wave into lives that fail to provide them with the means to be effective, enriching members of our society. The soil is poverty and the plant will not grow true and straight in such an environment. Some schools have made great gains in an environment of poverty, but they are too few and we do not seem to have the resources to apply those measures that made them succeed to every school that needs them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A couple of years ago, I was invited by the principal of our local Title I High School to a community meeting in which he was going to share his goals for the school year. The meeting quickly turned into a heated discussion among the adults in the room about all of the ills of society and who was to blame for them. There was lots of finger-pointing. “It’s the parents’ fault! That’s the problem!!”, one person cried. “Kids these days have no respect! That’s the problem!”, stated another.
After about ten minutes of a conversation that was going nowhere, I’ll never forget what happened next. A small hand went up in the back of the room. It was the President of the Student Council. The principal recognized her and this is what she stood up and said:
“You all want to talk about problems? The problem is that we never see any of you in our hallways and classrooms. We want to see community members like you on our campus, but we never do.”
And there it was…From the mouths of babes…
The silence in the room was palpable.
This young woman nailed it, as our kids usually do if and when we give them the opportunity to be heard.
She knew that old African proverb that so many American communities have forgotten in this era when visits to schools have been replaced by “accountability labels” that can be viewed with the click of a mouse from a thousand miles away — IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE A CHILD.
Reblogged this on Thinking in the Deep End.
Real educators know this, but why listen to us?